The Sunday Times - UK (2022-02-06)

The Sunday Times February 6, 2022 19

NEWS REVIEW

T

he minister whose job it is to

tackle disinformation could

only squirm when asked

about his boss’s predilection

for spreading it. In the House

of Commons the day before,

Boris Johnson had included

the name of Jimmy Savile in

an attack on the Labour

leader, Sir Keir Starmer — a

conspiracy theory straight out of far-right

circles online. Yet Chris Philp, the minis-

ter for tech and the digital economy,

refused to condemn Johnson during his

appearance before the digital, culture,

media and sport committee on Tuesday.

As John Nicolson, the Scottish National

Party MP who quizzed Philp, asks: “If you

can’t trust the disinformation minister to

handle disinformation, who can you

trust?”

Johnson’s smear — and Philp’s failure

to admit it was misleading — shows how

disinformation and conspiracy theories

have taken root at the centre of British

life. It is no longer a sickness of the darker

reaches of the internet or of our Ameri-

can counterparts; we have caught the dis-

ease too. The country is awash with mis-

information, from vaccine disbelievers

on Thursday night’s Question Time trying

to lecture the experts, to our political

overlords’ distortions, equivocations and

outright lies.

Johnson’s performance on Monday

was, says Ian Hislop, the editor of Private

Eye, a “new low” in British political life.

“Is the prime minister now allowed to

quote QAnon theories under privilege?

Will he refer to David Icke as an authority

without any censure from the House?

This is Trumpian, post-truth politics infil-

trating Westminster,” he says.

Johnson was warned by aides against

using the Savile line. It seemed like a ploy:

by putting Starmer and Savile in the same

sentence, those two names are now

entwined in many voters’ minds.

Politicians have always lied, of course,

but now we have the magnifying force of

the internet. “You get reinforcement for

even unfounded beliefs in the online age,

and we know there are communities that

will amplify them,” says Will Moy, the

chief executive of the charity Full Fact.

“Part of the draw of conspiracy thinking

is being in an in-group.”

The slur against Starmer is emblematic

of how most online disinformation works

in that it has a kernel of truth in it, says

Marianna Spring, the BBC’s disinforma-

tion and social media reporter. Her new

podcast, Death by Conspiracy, starts later

this month. When he was the director of

public prosecutions (DPP), Starmer apol-

ogised for the CPS’s failure to prosecute

Savile, but he had not been directly

involved in that decision.

The origin of the claim against Starmer

is believed to be a 2018 article on the

right-wing political website, Guido

Fawkes, concerning his time as DPP

(2008-13). According to research by the

campaign group Hope Not Hate, searches

for “Starmer” and “Savile” peaked in

April 2020 when the far-right fake news

site Politicalite published a piece with the

headline, “New leader new danger: Keir

Starmer ‘helped paedophile Jimmy

Saville [sic] evade justice’”.

Lia Nici, the Conservative MP for Great

Grimsby, claimed on BBC5 Live last week

that when Starmer visited her seat last

month, constituents asked on social

media why he was coming in light of Sav-

ile. “This was absolutely, utterly the num-

ber one issue for local people,” she said.

“[They said]: ‘He did this with the CPS.

He should be ashamed.’”

Spring says that the Savile claims have

melded with the theories of QAnon, an

outlandish US conspiracy cult about dev-

il-worshipping paedophiles, which is

linked to the most devoted Donald

Trump supporters and has been branded

has ever seen, and you are saying

nothing!’”

A

lthough such theories may seem

mad to most of us, they have a dan-

gerous secondary consequence.

Significant fabrications mean that

some big but more credible errors

or lies can get overlooked. While many

were fixated on Johnson’s Starmer

smear, the UK Statistics Authority criti-

cised Johnson and the Home Office for

incorrectly claiming that crime had

fallen. Johnson also repeated a claim that

there are more people in work than at the

start of the pandemic, which the watch-

dog had already called “incorrect”.

One of the most famous recent mis-

truths in British life was slapped on the

side of Vote Leave’s Brexit bus: “We send

the EU £350 million a week — let’s fund

our NHS instead”. The campaign also

repeated the idea that Turkey was about

to join the European Union. The trouble

is, these are complex themes to debunk

so what sticks in the mind of some voters

is the underlying premise rather than the

correction.

In an interview last year with Laura

When the PM

invoked Jimmy

Savile he brought an

online hoax into the

heart of public life.

Truth is, there are

more lies out there

than we realise, says

Rosamund Urwin

Disinformation by the Brexit

campaign and false claims

about Jimmy Savile and the

effects of 5G signals and

vaccines have spread rapidly

a potential domestic terrorism threat by

the FBI. QAnon’s ideas have spread

swiftly to the UK.

At an anti-lockdown rally near Buck-

ingham Palace in the summer of 2020,

Spring spoke to a group of women who

were discussing fake “case studies” of

child abuse victims. “One of the women

specifically mentioned Starmer to me

and how he had protected Savile,” Spring

says. “I asked where she’d seen that, and

she said: ‘It’s all over my Facebook group;

it’s everywhere.’”

Spring warns that Johnson will have

given legitimacy to this false claim. New

internet memes

spread last week sug-

gesting that Starmer

had tried to protect

Savile, including some

using screengrabs of

BBC reports.

“Famous people and

world leaders are vec-

tors for disinformation,

because they are seen to

normalise and condone

false claims,” she says.

“Ideas grow, evolve and

spread, finding their way

from the fringes to the

mainstream through poli-

ticians, celebrities and people we

might trust and know.”

In America, QAnon has made it into

mainstream politics. Marjorie Taylor

Greene was voted in as a congresswoman

in Georgia a year ago. She has publicly

expressed support for QAnon in the past,

although she has since disavowed some

of its conspiracy theories. Taylor Greene

said last week that she was considering a

presidential run.

British politics has not been breached

in the same way — yet — although antivax-

ers are understood to have met at least

one senior Conservative MP, and Sir Des-

mond Swayne, a former aide to David

Cameron, last year urged anti-vaccina-

tion campaigners to continue their fight

against lockdown restrictions, claiming

that NHS capacity figures were being

“manipulated” to exaggerate the scale of

the pandemic.

Outside Westminster, prominent fig-

ures on social media such as the actor

Laurence Fox and the radio presenter

Beverley Turner have spread vaccine-

sceptical views. At the start of the pan-

demic, the broadcaster Eamonn Holmes

implied live on ITV’s breakfast show This

Morning that he believed that 5G signals

might cause coronavirus; he now

works for GB News.

Hislop notes that the Private Eye

postbag often contains conspirato-

rial nonsense. “It’s ‘I noticed that

you failed to include anywhere in

your magazine the truth about 5G

[mobile phone] masts’, and

‘Good to see Private Eye has

joined the establishment cov-

er-up — millions dying in the

biggest genocide the world

Are you Team Colin or Team Cuthbert?

Was Boris Johnson ambushed by

baked goods? And don’t get me started

on office treats. When did cake

get so political, asks Laura Pullman

However you

slice it, the

sponge wars

just got nasty

“very pleased with the

outcome”, its cut-price rival

celebrated a #FreeCuthbert

triumph, tweeting: “Getting

out early on good behaviour,

keep an eye out for Cuthy B

this spring.”

When Conor Burns, the

Northern Ireland minister

and Johnson ally, claimed the

PM had been “ambushed with

a cake” on his 56th birthday,

some assumed the weapon

was one of M&S’s £7 treats —

which has long been the

preferred cake for man-of-

the-people pretenders. As

mayor of London, Johnson

was photographed cutting a

Colin at his birthday nibbles

in 2015.

Burns later tried claiming

there had been no cake after

all, but details of its Union

Jack decoration were already

out — literal icing on the cake.

Cue custard pies thrown from

across the Atlantic, as

“gateaugate” was raised in the

White House. “Has the

president ever been

ambushed by cake? Not that

I’m aware of,” said a smirking

Jen Psaki, Joe Biden’s press

secretary, last week.

But then cakes and

offices has always be

a sticky

combination. I’ve

been known to

occasio

(“Does this have vanilla in it?

I’m not a big vanilla fan”) and

the busier-than-thou

colleague. “How do you find

the time?” they ask pointedly.

Then the vegans have a go,

with aquafaba meringues (egg

whites replaced with water

from chickpea tins) and

beetroot brownies. One

former colleague, a

wonderful vegan but woeful

baker, regularly brought in

homemade “treats”, which

were hidden under mouse

mats before being

surreptitiously binned.

Gender politics come into

play too. Should serious

working women be bringing

in cupcakes for everyone? “I

suppose I could have stayed

home and baked cookies and

had teas,” said Hillary

Clinton, sarcastically

defending her own career

during her husband’s 1992

presidential campaign.

Henry Bird, a Bake Off

contestant in 2019, now

works in the offices of The

Sunday Times and The Times

and brings in custard tarts,

Basque cheesecakes,

meringue pies and genoise

traybakes (irritatingly

delicious). What’s his view on

bringing in a cake on your

birthday? “If you’re walking

into the office with a lit

birthday cake for yourself,

then you’ve gone wrong

somewhere,” he says.

In 2017, civil servants were

warned in a Treasury blog

post that bringing cakes into

work could be a “public

health hazard” and to be

mindful of those “who have

difficulty resisting”. The

sugar-snatching killjoys were

much mocked at the time, but

if Westminster had heeded

that advice, maybe Johnson

wouldn’t have quite so much

cake on his face now.

Should a

woman bake

cupcakes?

W

hen did cake become

so contentious? The

“cream tea coup” in

Westminster last

week was linked to a

party 18 months earlier, when

Boris Johnson, we now know,

was “ambushed with a cake”.

A row involving some

Christian bakers who refused

to ice “Support gay marriage”

on a cake has dragged on for

the best part of a decade, and

The Great British Bake Off’s

defection from the BBC to

Channel 4 was the media

story of 2016.

And, perhaps most bitterly,

it’s been cake forks at dawn in

the supermarket aisles as

Colin the Caterpillar takes on

his German doppelgänger,

Cuthbert. Last week, Marks &

Spencer (in Colin’s corner)

and Aldi (in Cuthbert’s)

reached a secretive deal over

the copycaterpillar row.

While M&S declared itself

e House. “Has the

dent ever been

shed by cake? Not that

ware of,” said a smirking

aki, Joe Biden’s press

tary, last week.

t then cakes and

s has alwaysbe

ky

ination. I’ve

known to

io

nally palm off my polenta

lemon drizzle on colleagues —

we cake-ambushers are

people-pleasers who bake for

our own egos. But carting

your Nigella Guinness cake on

the train to work (cream-

cheese icing leaking) is

increasingly a mug’s game.

For your efforts, you’ll now

face the predictable gluten-

free brigade, the nitpicker

needing a full ingredients list

The PM has enjoyed a

slice of an M&S Colin

the Caterpillar cake

Anyone who

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o this false claim. New here is wrong

mes

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Anon has made it into

tics. Marjorie Taylor

in as a congresswoman

that NHS capaci

“manipulated” to

thepandemic.

Outside Westm

ures on social m

Laurence Foxan

Beverley Turner

sceptical views. A

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Hislop no

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here is wrong

Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor,

Dominic Cummings, who ran Vote Leave

and is now accusing the prime minister of

repeatedly lying, smirked when asked

about the controversial campaign poster:

“Turkey (population 76 million) is joining

the EU”. Cummings responded: “We

didn’t say it’s about to join, we said it’s in

the process of joining, which it was.”

But lies are by no means the preserve

of the political right. A left-leaning web-

site circulated claims in 2017 that

Kuenssberg was going to speak at the

Conservative Party conference. Antise-

mitic conspiracies spread during Jeremy

Corbyn’s Labour leadership. More

recently, Labour supporters and MPs

have repeated inaccurate claims about

the cost of the coronavirus Test and Trace

programme. Often misrepresented as

£37 billion given to the outsourcing firm

Serco by the government, in fact the fig-

ure was the total budget for the pro-

gramme, not all of which was spent. “I

don’t think this skews one way or

another,” says Moy. “What you go for goes

along with your political views but I don’t

think one side is more susceptible.”

Britain is not America. The UK lacks

some of the powerful interest groups,

such as the US gun lobby, which may help

to propagate misinformation, and our

politics remains less partisan. But Spring

cautions against complacency. “Our

political landscape is different [but] the

nature of social media and how universal

it is means we’ve started seeing this huge

overlap in the narratives, content and

posts that are shared,” she says. “With

Covid-19 conspiracy groups, lots of the

influencers whose posts are shared will

be from the US, but we have copycat fig-

ures here in the UK who use the same

techniques. The way social media has

made everything so global has reduced

our advantage.”

Moy adds: “Anyone who thinks what

happened in the US can’t happen here is

wrong. What will stop it happening is

people being willing to challenge their

own side when they are being inaccurate.

The thing that has made the US side

worse is utter polarisation and the inabil-

ity of people on one side to talk to

another — but we do have a lot of that

here too, both around Covid, and also

with Brexit. The UK is at risk of a dark

political situation, but it is in our hands

and some people are showing the kind of

leadership we need to avoid that.”

And we’ll need that leadership. The

technology is also evolving. The next

potential form of misinformation — deep

fake videos in which a person’s face is dig-

itally altered so that they appear to be

someone else — is becoming ever more

plausible, with vast potential political

ramifications. Already, in the run-up to

the 2019 general election, the Conserva-

tives shared a selectively edited clip of

Starmer talking about Brexit.

What can be done? Reality checkers

such as Full Fact are part of the solution.

The charity launched in 2010, inspired in

part by the journalist Peter Oborne’s

book The Rise of Political Lying. It now has

35 staff, including an artificial intelli-

gence team.

Hislop wants social media sites includ-

ing Facebook to be treated as publishers,

so they are held responsible for what is

on their platforms. The long-awaited

Online Safety Bill is a chance for the UK to

be a world leader in tackling disinforma-

tion. Nicolson, who was a journalist

before he entered politics, applauds

broadcasters for being more willing now

to say that politicians are lying, and notes

a proposal in parliament that will mean if

an MP lies deliberately, one of their col-

leagues can ask the speaker to have the

statement checked by the House of Com-

mons library.

Perhaps some reassurance should

come from the political reaction to John-

son’s Savile comment. Amber Rudd, the

former home secretary, called it “Trump-

ian” and said it risked alienating tradi-

tional Tory voters. The prime minister’s

longstanding trusted adviser Munira

Mirza quit dramatically on Thursday,

writing in a letter to her former boss that

he had made a “scurrilous accusation”.

Tobias Ellwood, the chairman of the

defence select committee, submitted a

letter of no confidence in Johnson, pro-

claiming: “We’re better than this.”

Eventually, three days too late, John-

son did something very unTrumpian,

admitting that Starmer had nothing to do

with the Savile decision. But as Mark

Twain didn’t actually say (more fake

news), a lie can travel around the world

and back again while the truth is lacing

up its boots.

NEWS REVIEW

ARTWORK: TAMARA KONDOLOMO